The cheap shoulderbag I had bought in San Jose, Costa Rica, to replace my fanny pack which had been stolen, was falling apart, so I bought another cheap bag for S18000 (US$5) before leaving town this morning at about 9:30.
I head out of town to the northeast on the road back to Ambato, but a couple of miles out of town I turn left, heading southwest up the Chambo river valley towards Riobambo. The road follows the river for the most part and is nicely paved. As I approach Riobambo I am treated to spectacular views of Volcan Chimborazo, completely unobscured by clouds. I continue on looking for the perfect photo-op when I find myself in the outskirts of Riobambo. By the time I work my way through town and out the other side, the clouds have moved in to obscur the lower three quarters of the mountain.
South out of Riobambo the road climbs a bit until it comes out on a high 10000 foot flat valley with several lakes. Sheep, goats and cattle are grazing alonside the road, and farmers are drying hay and something which looks like long canes in big bundles. The sun is out but it is quite cool.
Eventually the road climbs up into higher mountains and it gets foggy and colder. I stop to put on another shirt and my Aerostich pants. The fog is very thick in places and other times it rains lightly.
Dogs in Ecuador seem to be more aggressive and likely to chase motorcyclists than in other countries. Fortunately they seem to know enough not to actually get in front of the bike itself, but rather chase along from the side.
I lose track of the number of water balloons and buckets of water which are thrown at me from the roadside as I pass. Most miss me. One hits my left saddlebag. I see a lot more people in the back of pickup trucks get plastered though. Again, shrieks and laughter is the usual reaction.
South of Palmira the road surface becomes worse and is frequently broken asphalt or dirt. I hit a detour which climbs up and around a long stretch of road, presumably due to a landslide. On this stretch, one ingenious young boy is using a water hose to douse passing motorists. And it's not just an ordinary garden hose, but one which projects a 2" stream of water out onto the road. I get doused but as I have on my full Aerostich it doesn't really matter. The road remains bad, off and on, the rest of the way to Cuenca.
On one stretch, dropping down in elevation, with the mountain side to my left and the valley to my right, clouds are blowing up over the mountain from below, and to my right and above is a complete whiteout of clouds and fog. I am riding along the mountainside in a narrow tunnel of clear visibility as the clouds blow up the mountainside above the niche the road is carved into.
I stop for lunch in Canar at about 2pm and a couple of hours later arrive in Cuenca where I stop for the night at the Residencia Siberia where I pay S18000 for a room with a bath.
Cuenca is a nice old colonial city situated along the Rio Tomebamba, and has nice wide streets, many old buildings made out of the locally quarried marble, and a beautiful plaza with an old cathedral with blue and white cupolas.
I spend most of the evening ppouring over my maps and guidebooks. The realization that I might need to change my strategy with respect to getting to Tierra del Fuego has been creeping up on me. It's the begining of February and I'm only to Ecuador. 2 monthe is not much time to cover the sites in Peru and Chile, and that would still get me down to Tierra del Fuego very late in the season, possibly with very bad weather. The plan which is forming is to travel down to around Lima at a reasonable pace, but from there blast down to around Puerto Montt in Chile where I catch a 4-day boat to Pueerto Aisen and then again travel at a more reasonable pace down to Tierra del Fuego. Then I would turn around and follow a more zigzag route back north, eventually revisiting parts of northern Chile and Southern Peru I missed on the way south and also giving me more time to see Bolivia.
Doing it this way will probably result in a longer overall trip since my return route north will not be as direct as otherwise envisioned, but will remove the time pressure I have been feeling about reaching Tierra del Fuego before winter sets in.
The first impact of this revised strategy will be felt tomorrow. Rather than crossing the border to Peru at Macara, Ecuador (via Loja) and then heading southwest to Sullana in Peru. I'll head over to Machala Ecuador on the coast and then follow the coast, crossing the border at Huaquillas, Ecuador.
My original route involved long stretches of dirt roads and while the mountain scenery was supposed to be great, I've seen much spectacular mountain scenery already and will see more in the months ahead. The new route will cut a day off getting to Peru since it is faster and has better roads and is more direct.
Before leaving Cuenca, I change my excess Sucres back into dollars (about $70). My guidebook says to follow Avenida Gran Colombia to pick up the roads leading south and west. I do and soon am on a wide, newly paved road heading more or less west, though slightly north. I expect it to turn south shortly, and because it is such a big and new road think it must be the road southwest to Machala. At a military checkpoint, where I show my documents, I ask the soldiers how long to Machala and they say 4 hours by bus. Later as the road continues northwest I suspect that I'm not on the road I planned to take, but as this road is so good and the scenery is so spectacular I keep on going. It is heading west after all. The road climbs up through bleak, windswept mountains, cresting a pass at about 13800 feet with small alpine lakes dotting the surrounding landscape. Down the other side there are numerous landslides with heavy equipment clearing the road. At several I must wait several minutes for the equipment before proceeding. At places the fog is very thick which makes seeing these slide zones difficult.
Eventually I drop out of the mountains and see the flat, green, coastal plain stretching away before me, and when I reach it I am once again in a warm, humid, tropical climate. At a T-intersection, I turn left, heading south, still not exactly sure what road I took, but knowing that I needed to head south to Machala where the road I indended to take went. The road I was now on, was straight and headed south-southwest through banana plantations and low scrubby jungle. It was also humid and hot.
As I rode through this countryside, I thought to myself, that while beautiful, I much prefer riding in the mountainous regions of the Andes. I find the scenery more interesting and beautiful, the roads are definitely more interesting and fun on a motorcycle, and I prefer riding in cool temperatures than hot.
At a small town I stopped to gas up, having put just over 370 miles on this tank. This was an example of the benefit of the large tank. When I left Cuenca this morning I already had 256 miles on this tank and I had expected to fill up on the way out of town, but hadn't seen any filling stations. I wasn't worried since my map showed numerous towns on the road to Machala. Well the road I ended up on had no towns or villages along it and it was so new that there were no gas stations either. Without the large tank I would have had to turn around or be a bit more disciplined in planning my gas stops. The large tank just provides a bit of flexibility and peace of mind.
I borrowed their hose to wash off my Aerostich pants, my boots and the bike as several of the slide areas had a fair amount of mud I had to ride through. I also used the opportunity to look at my maps more closely to determine just what road I had ridden through the mountains. The road went through the Cajas National Recreation Area, and my maps showed it as being dirt, while my guidebook did mention that paving was in progress. I was glad I had taken it, though it had added at least an hour of time to my trip to Machala as the road intersected the coast highway about 75 miles north of Machala.
I headed south, bypassing downtown Machala, passing through several more uneventful military checkpoints, and arrived at the border town of Huaquillas at about 2:30. From Machala to Huaquillas the terrain had turned drier and desert-like. I stopped at a restaurant in Huaquilla for lunch. I sat where I could see the bike parked at the curb 15 feet away. Five young Ecuadorian men in their early 20s came in and sat at the table behind mine and we struck up a conversation. To talk with them I had to turn around in my seat, putting my bike, and my things at the table out of my sight, which made me a bit uneasy, a result of my experience in San Jose and hearing about Jeff Coult's experiences as well. It's an unfortunate side effect of the actions of a couple bad apples, ruining it for the rest. In the end, nothing transpired and we had an interesting conversation. They offered me a glass of beer out of the large bottle they were drinking and I accepted. One of them, Manuel Castro, had obviously been drinking before the current bottle had been opened, and would repeatedly ask what my name was. We'd all laugh and remind him that it was "Dooglas." Manuel was by far the most talkative, probably spurred on by his state of intoxication. After many of the typical questions about my bike, my trip, my marital status, whether I had a girlfriend and kids, Manuel asked whether I liked Ecuadorian or American women better. I diplomatically answered that I liked both, that they were both different. He liked that answer, laughed, and gave me a thumbs up. It was now 3:30 and I had spent more time at the restaurant than I had planned, so waving goodbye I headed through town to the border.
Things change quickly and the guide book was wrong on most accounts regarding the border crossing here at Huaquillas. The book implied that on the Ecuadorian side you could get your exit stamp either at the immigration office in town or at the office just before the bridge into Peru. I decided to avoid the mass of traffic and people around the office in town and proceed to the office near the border. This meant riding through a crowded market area, crowded with people and stalls, and while negotiating this mess several men and boys who had seen me pass the immigration office in town, caught up to me, and said I needed to get my exit stamps back at the office I had just passed. After confirming I couldn't in fact get the exit stamps at the office by the border I turned around and followed my newly self-appointed guide back to the immigration office in town. When my "guide" saw the Libreta for my cycle, he said that things would be easy, and in fact they were. One stamp in my passport and a couple in my Libretta after they removed the exit portion, and I was out of there in about 20 minutes. Fortunately I had got there just before a bus carrying a Colombian soccer team.
Outside I haggled a bit with a moneychanger before settling on an exchange rate and I changed my remaining Sucres into Peruvian Sols. The going rate is between 2 and 2.6 Sols to the dollar. He was a bit annoyed I think when I only had 31000 Sucres (US$10) to exchange.
My "guide" hurried alongside me as I rode back through the market area to the international bridge 2 blocks away. Before crossing the bridge, at a booth on the right side, I had to show my passport, then walk across the road to show my Libretta to an officer who wrote down pertinent information in his notebook, and said the fee was 5000 Sucres. In retrospect I think I just contributed to his pocket linings, but at the time, not having dealt with border fees for the last several crossings, I was out of practice, and didn't even think of asking for a receipt. Now the problem was I had already exchanged my remaining Sucres into Sols and only had 3 Sucres in coins. My young "guide" quickly produced his wallet and gave me 2 Sucres with which I was able to pay the fee. I also knew that my "guide" had now at least earned a nominal payment.
My guidebook said that on the Peruvian side they might check your passport at the bridge, but that you didn't get stamped into Peru until the official checkpoint 3 km later. Wrong again. Immediately after crossing the bridge there was a immigration booth where I filled out a tourist card and got my passport stamped. I asked the man at the desk where to go for my motorcycle and he indicated the Aduana office 100 meters down the street on the left.
Now I planned to try to get the bike into Peru without using the Libreta since it had only 8 pages left and I wasn't entirely sure which countries ahead used it, plus I would be entering numerous countries, especially with my revised travel plans, multiple times. My "guide" had accompanied me across the bridge, and he knew I had the Libreta and I didn't want him to screw my plans up so I told him I was not going to use the Libreta. He said I needed to use it, but I told him I didn't think so and wasn't planning to use it and didn't want him to mention it. The information I have from several sources is that officially no country, including Ecuador or Colombia, now require the Libreta. While this may be the case, it may still be true, that with a Libreta the procedure is a lot easier. On the other hand, as I found out when entering Colombia from Venezuela, having the Libreta doesn't necessarily make it a painless process.
In the Aduanas office, I show my passport, drivers license, and bike title and the official tells me to make copies of my passport and title and I think I'll be able to enter without using the Libreta. Another official then asks if I have a Libreta, and before I can decide how to answer this, my "guide", who had been standing just outside the open window, volunteers that, yes, I had a Libreta. Well that screwed everything up, as now the officials didn't want to proceed in the original manner, but insisted that I use the Libreta. I was really pissed at my "guide" and let him know it when I went out to the bike to get the Libreta. I tried explaining why I preferred not using the Libreta but that didn't help. Not being in the mood to haggle or argue with the officials I decided to use the Libreta, and after making copies of my passport and tourist card, the formalities with the Libreta were completed in 5 minutes and I was officially stamped into Peru. I tried asking the officials about my problem of limited pages and multiple entries into countries, and whether it was possible to complete the exit section only when leaving for the final time (as had been suggested by the man at the Venezuelan Auto Club). But the language barrier was too great and I wasn't in the mood to pursue it so let the subject drop. I was still pissed at the guide, but gave him a small tip to cover the sucres he had lent me and his "help" back at the market in Huaquilles. Then I headed south into Peru.
The road, for the most part, followed the coast, within sight of the ocean. Here the coast was sand beaches with numerous small huts or cabanas along it. Many of these appeared to be homes with people living in them. The surrounding terrain inland was dry desert-like with some low barren hills. The road turned inland away from the coast for a stretch through the surrounding barren hills and I had to stop at a customs checkpoint and show my documents. I asked the official here about the Libreta and he said that the other countries south of here, Chile, Bolivia. Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, didn't use the Libreta so it would not be a problem. He seemed to know what he was talking about, so we'll see.
I was originally planning to go on to Talares for the night, but the sun was setting quickly, and riding through the small town of Mancora, I saw several residencias, and decided to stop for the night, since it was another 30 miles or so to Talares. I got a room at Residencia Casablanca, on the edge of town, just across the street from the beach, for S5 (US$2) with shared bath. I paid in dollars since I was low on Sols. I needed to find a bank tomorrow.
It had been a long day, I had only gotten about 5 hours of sleep the night before because I was looking at my maps, and my stomach was a bit upset, and after taking a shower I collapsed on the bed and quickly fell asleep. The mosquitos are a bit of a pest here, for the first time in a long time, and I had dream about getting malaria.
I slept in and then spent the rest of the morning, reading, writing my journal, and going for a swim in the Pacific Ocean. The weather was beautiful. Not too hot, but warm enough that a swim felt good. The water temperature was perfect. There were decent enough waves that a lot of surfers were out on their boards. Also quite a few women in bikinis. Now that's something I don't get to see if I only ride the roads in the Andes!
There were 3 surfer-dudes and their girlfriends from Arica, Chile, a town near the Peruvian border, staying at the residencia I was at. They were travelling up the coast to Ecuador during their summer vacation. One of the girls borrowed my Ecuador map to make copies from.
After showing the woman who runs the hotel my computer and it's fax/modem, and after putting the fax/modem card back in, the computer wouldn't turn back on. It just would beep. That's a sick feeling because you don't know if it is going to be a major problem or just another glitch in the DOS operating system. I'm also hesitant to change the main batteries, because if the backup battery is dead or low you can wipe out the memory. That's what happened back in Belize. I watch the level of the backup battery pretty carefully now, and was pretty sure it was OK, so tried putting new main batteries in the computer. It didn't help. Then I tried to reboot it with the standard CTRL-ALT-DEL combination. It wouldn't reboot either. Finally I tried the last resort, a hard reset with the CTRL-SHIFT-ON combination, and that worked. At this point you're never sure, what, if anything, has been affected, and you start activating the applications you were using and checking if critical files are there. I did lose stuff I had written with the editor that morning and hadn't saved yet, but other than that everything appeared OK. Whew!!
I didn't leave till almost 1:30. I needed to find a bank to either exchange some dollors, or better yet, get some Sols from a bank machine, but since it was during lunch I didn't even bother to ask if there was a bank in town. If there was it probably didn't have an ATM on the Plus System.
Initially the road continued along the coast through desert-like terrain of sand and dirt hills with little if any vegetation. Eventually it left the coast, switchbacking up through the surrounding dirt hills till the road came out on a plateau at an elevation of about 900 feet. The road stayed up on the plateau for a while, finally switchbacking back down as I approached Talara, reached by a spur road to the west.
From Talara, the road headed southeast, inland, and the surrounding terrain changed from mostly dirt to sand. At places it was flat sand with scrubby bushes and at other places there were large sand dunes on either side of the road. Stretches of road had small trees planted along the roadside, presumably as windbreaks. A light wind was blowing inland from my right side, blowing ribbons of sand across the road surface. Occasionally along the road there were "settlements", which consisted of houses built one deep along the roadside. Some of the houses were of mud brick construction, others were concrete or concrete block, and some of wood. All were low, squat affairs to accomodate the incessant wind. It wasn't clear where these people got their water from. The wind stirred up enough sand and dirt that a thick haze extended as far as one could see, and the mountains in the distance were just blurry monoliths.
Areas of the desert reminded me very much of the Mojave Desert, or Death Valley in Southern California, with jagged, craggy mountains on the distant horizon.
I stopped at a Texaco station on the outskirts of Sullana around 3pm to ask directions to a bank. I had to ask directions a couple more times, and in the end the driver of one of the local 3-wheel motorcycle taxis led me the last couple of blocks to the bank, which had a Plus System ATM across the street from which I was able to get Sols. Sullana is where I would have joined the Pan American Highway if I had gone through Loja, Ecuador and crossed the border at Macara.
I returned to the Texaco and gassed up. Surprisingly, even with the high speeds I've been doing, my mileage for this tank was 37.8mpg. 95 octane gas was US$2.76 per gallon. Ouch.
Here in coastal Peru, and in coastal Ecuador as well the most common form of taxi is a 3-wheeled affair which uses the front end off a motorcycle, with the driver sitting on the motorcycle seat, but the rear end has 2 side-by-side wheels and a seat in between for the passengers. They are everywhere and one is constantly dodging them in traffic in the cities and towns.
From Sullana the road headed due south to Piura and then on another 275 km to Chiclayo, my destination for the day. The entire way was desert, interrupted only by Piura and a few sporadic dwellings along the roadside. Piura was a bleak city of about 300000 people, situated at an oasis, but it still had sand blowing through it's streets. It was actually founded 3 years before Lima by the conquistadores left behind by Pizarro. I just passed through on my way south.
South of Piura the desert became even bleaker, alternating between areas of sand dunes and areas of table-flat sand stretching to the horizon. In areas like this the wind had miles and miles to build up strength and there was a ferocious cross-wind from 90 degrees off my bow on my starboard side. The bike had to be heeled well over into the wind to maintain a straight heading. At several spots where the dunes encroached right up to and on to the road, workcrews of 3-4 men were using brooms, in a seemingly futile effort to keep the sand at bay.
The Pan American Highway in Peru is in excellant shape, there is very little traffic, it is very straight in most places, and the distances to be covered are great. Given those factors I had been keeping my speed at between 70-75 mph, certainly the fastest I've gone since Mexico. Now with the vicious crosswind I found that if I wicked my speed up a bit to 75-80 mph, the effects of the crosswind were somewhat reduced because the normal component of thw wind was then a smaller percentage of my overall velocity. A little techo-geek talk for those engineers following my saga.
Passing busses and large trucks became an interesting affair however. As I approached the rear of the bus in the passing lane, all of a sudden my speed would increase as I got sucked into it's draft, and then once out of the wind behind the bus I'd have to compensate my lean angle. Then as I passed the bus, and emerged from it's protection, the blast of wind would again hit me and blow me towards the left side of the road. I quickly learned to anticipate and adjust.
There was one stretch of about half an hour where the wind really picked up in intensity. So much so that it was very difficult to hold my head upright against the wind and it felt likeI was doing isometric exercises with my neck and I could feel my neck muscles straining and getting sore.
As I approached Chiclayo, irrigation increased and there were rice paddies, fields of sugar cane, and other crops and cattle grazing. Large tractors were not an uncommon sight in the surrounding fields.
I arrived in Chiclayo, another oasis city of about 280000 people around 6pm, and got a room at the Hostal San Ramon for S17 (US$6.80) with bath. Just as for some of the hotels in Bogota, the Handbook had bad information regarding parking. It said it had a car park but that was not the case. The hotel and its rooms were located on the 2nd and 3rd floors of the building. It did however have a large area at the foot of the stairs on the first floor where the proprietor said I could park the bike. It wasn't ideal since the bike was clearly visable to passers-by in the street but it was dark by now and I didn't feel like looking for another hotel so decided to go with this. I covered the bike up, but also took off my tankbag and Givi topcase, something I've only done a handful of times during this trip.
After carrying my stuff up to the room I notice that one of the 6mm flat-head plastic bolts which holds the left-side faceshield mounting plate on my Shoei helmet has fallen out. I had thought that lowering the shield had become a bit more difficult. This was why. I'd have to try to fix it somehow before it broke further.
The wind had really tired me out, and even though I hadn't eaten anything all day since a midmorning brunch back in Mancara, and hadn't eaten dinner the night before, I was too tired to venture out and quickly fell asleep.
Electrically heated showers are fairly common in many countries in Latin America. They consist of a large shower head which directly heats the water as it passes through a series of coils. The slower you run the water, the hotter it is. I had read numerous accounta of people getting shocked by faulty installations of these devices, but had never experienced it myself, until this morning. Nothing really serious, just a small tingle when I would touch the water faucet when my feet were touching the wet floor. Similar to the tingle you get if you touch a 1.5 volt battery with your tongue. All the same, I minimized the number of times I touched the faucet.
In the morning I walked around the block until I found an open restaurant. The owner, a gentleman in his mid-fifties asked if he could join me and we talked while I ate my breakfast of bistek, rice, and salad, and a large glass of fresh papaya juice. He had travelled through much of South America, including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. He was President of the Chiclayo chapter of the Lions Club and showed me his membership card, and when I told him that my father was also a member back in Pennsylvania that got him talking about the various charity events his chapter had sponsored locally. The market area was one block away and as is common when talking with locals, he warned me to be careful for thieves when walking in the market area. He was quick to add that 95% of the people were good and only 5% or so were bad, and I pointed out that it was the same in most countries, including tha United States.
I left Chiclayo and rode back north 10km to the town of Lambayaque, where the Bruning Archaeological Museum is located. It covers the Mochica, Lambayaque, Chimu, and Vicus cultures that thrived in this area circa AD 1-650. The museum contains the spectacular gold treasures and physical remains themselves, found in the tomb of the Lord of Sipan, a Moche warrior priest, at the nearby archaeological site of Sipan in 1987. The displays were all in Spanish, but a lot could be deduced from the content and my limited Spanish. I had trouble leaving the museum because the guards and other patrons who had seen the bike parked out front all wanted to talk. With me walking around in my big motorcycle boots it was clear I was the owner.
In the museum I learned, that while the amount of irrigation in areas surrounding the present day oases is impressive, in the times of the early cultures, even a larger percentage of the land was irrigated and cultivated, with an extensive network of canals and viaducts which brought water from the Andes down into the arid coastal plains. Many of those canals and viaducts are still used today. The Lambayaque region is one of Peru's main agricultural regions.
I leave Lambayaque about 1:30-2:00pm and decide to skip stopping at the Sipan Archaeological site which is east of Chiclayo. Most of the important, original contents of the tombs excavated there are displayed in the museum in Lambayaque. I also plan to visit several sites near Trujillo, 120 miles to the south, and my destination for tonight.
The terrain is more desert, interspersed with areas of irrigation. Crossing a small river in one such area, the air is full of large flying insects of some sort which seem to home in on me and the bike as we pass. The bugs are big enough that it is difficult not to fixate on them as they zoom in towards you.
I stop at a Shell station on the outskirts of Trujillo to check my guidebook for the road to Huanchaco, a small fishing village just northwest of Trujillo where I planned to spend at least 2 nights. One of the attendants, a pretty young woman, in her Shell uniform, comes over to offer assistance. She was one of the few people to correctly "ask" if I was from the US. 90% of the time I'm asked if I'm from Germany. She also seemed intent on getting as close to me as she could while we were talking. Not that it was objectionable or anything.
Huanchaco is a beautiful, quiet, little fishing village, though the ocean-front Malecon now is lined with the expensive homes of the wealthy from Trujillo, and on weekends many come from the city to enjoy its beaches. But it still retains it's small-village charms and is a delightful place to spend a couple of days. It's also a nice base for exploring the archaeological sites around Trujillo of which there are quite a few.
I arrived in town, did one loop around the village and along the Malecon on the oceanfront and then parked along the Malecon and just sat and watched the waves coming ashore, the surfers farther out, and the people strolling along the beach. No sooner had I got off the bike than a young couple stopped to look at the bike and to talk. They were both university students in Trujillo, he studying Industrial Engineering, and she Business. He looked like he'd be at home on southern California beaches, with his shoulder-length blond hair and stylish oval glasses.
A little while later Jeff sat down and he and I and a steady stream of his friends talked for the next hour. Jeff was from Utah, where he was an interior remodeler, but had been in Peru and Ecuador now for about 8 months. He had just bought some land here in Huanchaco for US$3500, and planned to build a house here over the next couple of years. He had just helped a Swedish couple buy some land and they planned to return in 4 months to live permanently. I can understand where they are coming from. It's a very pleasant, laid-back village, with great beaches, relatively few tourists, and great climate. There is a major airport at Trujillo, closeby which makes access relatively easy.
I end up getting a room, directly across the Malecon from where I had parked at The Golden Club, a combination hostal, restaurant, and health club with full workout equipment, and a pool upstairs. Jeff was staying there as well while he fenced in his land. A single with shared bath was S10.
During the night I awoke with a high fever and sweating which then alternated with periods of being cold. My stomach was also quite upset. It stuck with me through the afternoon, and I basically just stayed in my room, sleeping and doing a bit of reading and writing, then sleeping some more. By evening I was feeling somewhat better and drug myself out of my room for the first time that day for some dinner.
Since I hadn't seen any of the nearby archaeological sites I decided to stay another day.
I first went to the two large Moche pyramids, Huaca del Sol and the Huaca de la Luna, south of Trujillo. The pyramids are situated in a desert area at the foot of a barren, rocky mountain. They contain millions of adobe bricks and are the largest precolombian structures in South America, though they are crumbling, and from a distance resemble large mounds of dirt. The Huaca de la Luna has some fine examples of very well preserved moldings and paintings of geometric designs. Some of the best I've seen on this trip. Parts of a few of the inner passageways were open for inspection. The flat desert floor between the two pyramids is littered with innumerable pottery shards. Literally, I don't think you could have found a square foot of ground that didn't have some pottery shards in it.
From there I rode back through Trujillo to the restored temple Huaca El Dragon, also known as Huaca Arco Iris (rainbow) after the shape of the friezes which decorate it. The temple is completely surrounded by huge 10-12m high adobe walls 4-5m thick and with a single narrow entrance opening. The temple itself is inside the walls and is a large flat-topped platform slightly higher than the surrounding walls, with wide ramps leading, around the periphery, up to the top. The sides of the interior temple were decorated with carvings of birds and animals. Difficult to capture the grandeur in words.
From there I visited the site museum at Chan-Chan on the road back to Huanchaco. Most of Chan-Chan now consists of crumbling adobe walls, but the fantastic thing about this site s it's shear size. Today it covers 14 square kilometers of an original 18-20 square kilometers. It was (is?) the largest adobe city in the world and was the imperial city of the Chimu culture. It consisted of 9 great compounds, each surrounded by 10-12m high walls, 4-5m thick with a single entrance, and each built for/by a particular Chimu king. Each contained storerooms, living quarters, ceremonial areas, water reservoirs, and burial area for the king and the other royalty of the palace. One such compound, the Ciudadele of Tschudi (named after the Swiss investigator who spent many years working here), has been largely restored and is open to the public and I visited it. The other areas are sprawled across the desert floor and while open to the public, offer only crumbling adobe walls.
As I was leaving Tschudi, a solo Japanese woman, from Tokyo, was also leaving and we spoke for a bit. At the entrance all the taxi drivers approached her about taking a cab, since the site was somewhat remote, off the main Trujillo-Huanchaco road, and the guidebooks warn about walking this route alone due to muggings. She waved off the taxi drivers and headed off down the road while I reloaded things on my bike. I stopped as I passed her on the road and offered her a ride out to the main road, which she readily accepted. You can cram a passenger behind me on the solo seat for short distances, though it wouldn't be comfortable for either for long distances.
Back at the hotel I remember to tackle the job of replacing the lost bolt in my helmet. I have a couple spare 6mm stainless-steel hex-head bolts which fit but are too long. I contemplate where in town I can find a hacksaw to cut it down when I remember that in my emergency kit I carry a collapsable hacksaw, and with it am able to cut the bolt to length and repair my helmet.
I also remember, for the first time when I am close to a sourse of sand, to try to "fix" my handlebar-mounted waterbottle, which several months ago I discovered had become moldy inside. Some sand and some vigourous shaking cleared out most of the bad stuff, then I filled it with some good water and 2 capfuls of saturated iodine solution to let it soak overnight. Hopefully that will fix it for now, though I'll have to watch it in the future.
At dinner that night, a group of 4 at the next table envite me to join them. They are just having some beers. Teo is from Spain, though he now lives and works in Zurich Switzerland. Jasmine is studying law at the University in Trujillo, and the other 2 guys (whose names I forget) are from Lima. All except Teo (and me) and are there for the surfing. There is a surfing competition here on Sunday. Around 10pm they leave to go into Trujillo to a disco; I decline since I'm still feeling some of the effects of yesterday and I plan to leave in the morning for parts south and west.
I got up early so I'd be out on the beach when the fishermen return in their caballitos between 7 and 8 AM. Caballitos are narrow, pointed fishing rafts made of totora reeds, and are used many places along the Peruvian coast. Unlike the reed rafts used on Lake Titicaca, these are flat, not hollow, and the fishermen either kneel on them, or sit on them with their legs dangling over the sides. They ride the breakers and surf almost like surfboards.
There were about a dozen boats out and they straggled in in ones and twos, and then a large group of about six came in together. The mornings catch was very meager.
I wrote in my journal while having a leisurely breakfast overlooking the ocean and the town pier, and then the lure of the sea breezes, the sun, and the surf was too much and I decided to stay another day.
I spent the rest of the day lazing around on the beach, watching a beach volleyball tournament, and basically soaking up the sun and doing nothing.